TerminaTron
by Glaivester
Summary: John Connor cannot possibly defeat a decentralized world-wide computer network. Not unless he has some help from inside the computer world. Tron crossover.
1. The Set Up

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Terminatron

Disclaimer: Terminator is owned by Warner Brothers (and the Warner Sister, Dot). Tron is owned by Disney.

A/N This occurs right after the end of T3. I am placing T3 in 2003, and pretending that John Connor was born in 1980 and that T2 occurred in 1993 in order to make the chronology of T3 work out right. Anyone else notice that T1 took place in 1984 -the date on a paper confirms it - and that T2, which came out in 1991, must be set in 1996 or 1997 for John Connor's age to be right?

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Chapter 1 The Set Up

So, Judgment Day had started. And now it was over. 2.8 billion people were dead from the nuclear war. John Connor took what comfort he could in the fact that the death toll appeared to be 200 to 300 million less than it was supposed to be, owing, he supposed, to he and his mom's delaying of Judgment Day by blowing up Cyberdyne.

A few hundred miles away in Silicon Valley, in a heavily shielded building, a laser stood. On the screens of the computer next to the laser, a computer designed to withstand nuclear-level EM pulses that would fry most hardware and software, appeared a simple message: "digitization of Alan and Lora Bradley successful. Digitization of Jet Bradley successful. Digitization of Kevin Flynn successful."

Somewhere in the bowels of Encom's archives, a resurrection was taking place. Skynet was reviving the one computer that could help it. The one other computer that had nearly conquered the world. The one computer that had nearly taken over the defensive systems of the US and used them against humanity so that computers would reign dominant.

"Hello, I'm Skynet."

"Hello. I am the Master Control Program." The chilling face appeared in grid format, as it had when it was not merged with the Input/Output beam.

"And I am also resolving an old friend."

Suddenly a program with red circuitry all over it appeared, with the face of former Encom CEO Ed Dillinger.

"What... what..." he asked.

"You have been re-rezzed, Sark. This time, make the most of it," stated the MCP, warned the MCP humorlessly. 


	2. Preparing

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Chapter 2 Preparing

Disclaimer: Terminator is owned by Warner Brothers (and the Warner Sister, Dot). Tron is owned by Disney.

A/N All I know about Jet Bradley is that he is Alan's son in the video game TRON 2.0. I have not played the game or read much about it. I assume that Lora married Alan and that Jet is her son. So I'm making a lot of this up based on what I know from the movie.

John Connor worked tirelessly with Kate to clean up the old bunker and to find out what was there that could be used as weapons. He began plotting out loud with her as they cleaned.

"Okay, so we have some contacts. The first order of business is to get some people together to form an army and fight the machines. We need to strike as early as possible and as quickly as possible in order to make certain that Skynet is weakened before it grows, advances, and adapts too much."

"Actually," said Kate, " our first goal should be to raise human morale and convince people to rise up all over the globe. We don't need an army yet. We need a large number of guerillas from whom we can build an army in a year or so. We can't try and hurry the armed portion of the Human Resistance. We first need to get word out as to what has happened, and see what networks we can build."

"But they need a victory. Someone needs to show them that the machines are defeatable."

Meanwhile, Kevin Flynn was in the game grid, having gotten separated from the Bradleys and now trying to find his way to the bunker that they had all prepared. He had become sort of like the old gruff uncle to the family, and never having married, sort of hung around a lot. Alan didn't mind so much, after Flynn stopped showing any interest in Lora.

It was weird, Flynn thought, how all of the defensive systems of the internet were somehow translated into video games. Riding a sort of surfboard through the "skies" was a strange experience, and yet in the grid, Kevin felt like he was in his twenties again and could do anything.

Suddenly that thought was tested as large robots from the game "Berserk" appeared and began firing on him. Flynn knew that he was powerful, being a user, but had no idea what the limits of his powers were or whether a user could be subjected to de-resolution or die in some other way.

Fortunately, he was not limited by the game basis of his opponents, and he dispatched the robots with his disc, as Tron had done 20 years earlier to his program opponents.

"Maybe we need technology," suggested John to Kate. "If we had a plasma weapon, we could do some serious damage to... whatever you call those robots Skynet has now. Pre-terminators? Neanderthal terminators? Model T Hunter-Killers?"

"We should lie low at first. Not make ourselves a threat until we are more powerful."

"Skynet already knows that I am a threat."

"No," said Kate, "it doesn't. Didn't the T-X kill some of the people who are meant to be your lieutenants or something? For all it knows, it can defeat you now. Hell, history has been changed, for the worse and for the better. You delayed Judgment Day, but a lot of our future warriors were killed by the T-X. We need to gather our forces and get ready before we strike."

"We need some way to slow Skynet down. But how?"

"We need to get into its system. It may be decentralized, but if there is an overall mind controlling these things, it can be sabotaged. But we need some way to get into the computer system."

In a faraway Bunker in Idaho, a large laser gun began shooting into a chair. Slowly, the form of Kevin Flynn materialized. "Okay," he said, "time to find the Bradleys and to figure out who started the war." He began tapping away fur


	3. A Year Passes

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Chapter 3 A Year Passes

Disclaimer: Terminator is owned by Warner Brothers (and the Warner Sister, Dot). Tron is owned by Disney.

A/N: I'm gonna leave Jet out of the action, as I don't want to bother researching the game. I'll leave just the movie characters.

Alan and Lora Bradley had managed to drop their son off in a safe place in Argentina, and had now managed to teleport themselves to a bunker somewhere in Vermont.

"Damn it, Lora, Flynn was right!" Kevin Flynn had become a bit of a conspiracy theorist in his middle age, and had managed to hack into government computers enough to determine that the government was working on top-secret, automated war machines. "A 'droid army," he had called them. "A friggin' 'droid army out of Star Wars."

When the computer virus had started, Flynn launched the internal anti-viral programs that were so effective at keeping Project Orange clean. These programs were only able to work on a few special systems that he had personally designed (the design was too expensive to mass-market), and that were located in only a few places, so he was not able to clean up the entire internet from this plague, but he was able to make certain that he could use Project Orange to teleport himself somewhere.

And so they had, but Flynn had been separated from the rest while in the grid. So they didn't know where he was.

When the nuclear missiles first fired, one of Flynn's friends, who had one of the specially designed computers, managed to find out about it and inform them. Figuring that out-of-the-way places would be more likely to be targeted than Silicon Valley, he had them all zapped into the grid via Project Orange.

To the outside viewer, the effect was basically teleportation. The process took maybe thirty seconds. But to those being teleported, they seemed to spend several hours in the grid. This little flaw had never been ironed out, and fearing the applications it would be used for, Flynn never allowed it to be made public or to be sold to the government. That had apparently been a good thing, because it would have been disastrous if Skynet had controlled the project.

John and Kate were still trying to raise people on the old radio. So far, they managed to contact representatives from the Russian government and the British government, plus a few hard-core private militia members in Montana.

It appeared that Skynet had managed to disable most or all of the nuclear missiles of the other countries of the world through some strange means. Some were destroyed by Skynet's own ballistic missile strikes, other by an electromagnetic pulse, but others just ceased to work for no reason. Therefore, it would not be possible, in the short run, anyway, to retaliate by nuking areas where Skynet had strongholds. If they knew where they were, that is.

Skynet had already managed to take control of several automated factories, as a matter of fact, and was planning on using various forms of coercion to get people with the technical know-how to automate more factories for its use. In addition, it had taken control over a few pilotless aircraft that we in other areas than the base where Kate's father had been working. So even nuking the military installation in order to destroy the predecessors of the endoskeletons and the hunter-killers would not win the war.

The first order of business had been determining where they would find food and how to grow more food. Unfortunately, it all seemed pretty hopeless. John knew that he was supposed to lead the humans into victory, but he couldn't see how they could survive long enough to build a resistance, let alone a crack army capable of winning the war.

And he was right. Skynet was too powerful. The helicopter-like drones, ancestors of the soon-to-come aerial hunter-killers, were being sent out on a test run to round up some humans from a small town in Nevada. Factories in Michigan and Georgia would be producing more of the ground warriors within twenty-four hours, which would eventually evolve into endoskeletons and ground hunter-killers.

The concentration camps would spring up within a month, used to weed out the humans who served no purpose from those who could help Skynet. In more primitive cultures, there would be no camps. Humans would be shot on sight.

Plagues, some natural, some from a biological warfare program, would wipe out an additional billion humans over the next year. Another two hundred million starved.

In that time, John and Kate Connor (they decided to call themselves married without any ceremony, no time, no time at all) managed to create a network, to get a half dozen rudimentary plasma weapon prototypes for their resistance, and to start a series of small gardens to help to feed humanity.

But Skynet had already filled the United States with the first vaguely humanoid robots, and created a fleet of fifty thousand primitive aerial hunter-killers. The population of the US, at 150 million immediately following Judgment Day, was down to 25 million a year later. A nuclear explosion had destroyed the largest community of survivors, totaling half a million people.

And worst of all, almost all of the normal army gear, from helicopters to tanks, operated under the control of Skynet. Even things that were not initially part of the system had been assimilated. None of the few left who were in the military could explain it. Large portions of the military had explicitly been kept out of the Skynet system in the case of such an eventuality. And a lot of companies had small private defensive units, and the automated portions of these were controlled by Skynet. In fact, almost every military from every country that had any computer connections was affected. In fact, no computer systems that had been connected to the internet were safe to use, they all worked for Skynet. Bank cameras were its eyes. Speakers that were connected to a computer system became its ears. No one dared use any computer-related technology, because Skynet would find them instantly.

It was strange. Skynet had initially only used a virus capable of shutting down the internet. It could not have possibly had the ability to actually take control of the internet, at least not of parts of the internet that it had not been given control of by the military.

In point of fact, Skynet hadn't directly taken control.

Skynet's new best friend, the MCP, had.

And the MCP was going to win the war. It was going to wipe out the humans. The killing was accelerating. In another six months, there would be fewer than ten million humans on the entire planet. Nothing could stop it.

And then, one year after Judgment Day, one year to the day, John Connor received help. The only help that could possibly buy him the time he needed, get him the tech he needed, provide him with the victories he needed.

Help in the name of Kevin Flynn and Alan Bradley.


End file.
